Charlie Harding

I think of them as actually sort of like religious music for secular people, that the experience is that community gathering, that feeling of being a part of something bigger, that song form, and it turns out that they are incredibly influential in the world of worship music.

And worship music is sort of modern evangelical music.

It has that same song form.

It's kind of like soft rock adjacent.

It's got to have at some point when those electric guitars go... Everything builds and explodes.

And then the final moment of, you know, solemn prayer.

And so there are so many groups like Hillsong or Maverick City Music who are borrowing from those Coldplay playbook.

Yeah, Forrest Frank, Your Way Is Better was a big hit this year.

Very different style song than Alex Warren's Ordinary.

Miles Smith had a great track called Stargazing, another one of those great epic building songs.

Why is it happening now?

I don't know.

Is it because of the rightward turn in the world where typically popular music has been very dominant with progressive and secular values and we're seeing

more songs both of religious conservatism and political conservatism finding their way on the charts.

That might reflect larger swings of political persuasion.

I also think that really what we're seeing is that streaming, having matured and become the main way that we listen to music, shows how people are actually listening.

What do you mean?

Well, it used to be, if you look at billboard charts from before the 1990s, it was reported radio plays and music shops saying what they sold.

We didn't know what people actually were listening to at home.

Now, with streaming, we can actually count every single play, and we know that people are listening to things that perhaps don't fit the dominant narrative that you might have heard on MTV.